Privacy Preserving Communication in MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks often support sensitive applications. These applications may require that users' identity, location, and correspondents be kept secret. This is a challenge in a MANET because of the cooperative nature of the network and broadcast nature of the communication media. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving communication system (PPCS) which provides a comprehensive solution to anonymize communication end- points, keep the location and identifier of a node unlinkable, and mask the existence of communication flows. We present an analysis of the security of PPCS against passive internal attackers, provide a qualitative discussion on its strength against external attackers, and characterize its performance trade-offs. The simulation results demonstrate that PPCS has only 3% lower packet delivery ratio than existing multi-path routing protocols, while effectively providing privacy service in MANETs.